The Terrible Loneliness

"The Last lovely City" is a short story written by Alice Adams (1927-1999). An American writer. After publishing her first story for the New Yorker (the magazine) in 1969, Ms. Adams became one of this magazine's most distinctive voices. Her 1975 novel "Families and Survivors," about a woman who moves from the South to San Francisco, established her as an important literary presence. "Superior Women," which traced the lives of five Radcliffe women, became a bestseller in 1984.
In this short story we can see Benito Zamora, a Mexican who is the main character of the story. He is a doctor, a very successful doctor, but, through the whole story we can see that even though he is famous and rich and known for everyone as an excellent doctor, he is not happy because he feels alone, and in fact he is alone although he knows everybody and he is grateful for many people, since the death of his wife Elizabeth he realizes that. He sees the society as bad, and he does not like to meet that people because he thinks they are corrupt.
"Old and famous, an acknowledged success both in this country and in his native Mexico, though now a sadhearted widower..." that is as this story begins. Since the very beginning we can see his success and his loneliness. Benito is invited to Stinson Beach to a lunch by Carla, a woman who he has met, but he wonders the reason for her invite to him. He remembrers his wife when he remembers the parties they used to go.
Here is where we can find the first part where we can see how alone he is "After Elizabeth died, now some few months ago, in April, friends and colleagues were predictably kind —many invitations, too many solicitous phone calls. And then just as predictably (he had seen this happen with relatives of patients), all the attention fell off and he was often alone" now that Benito's wife died he is alone and he knows nobody is going to be with him because he knows how people are. "Why must they leave him now, when he is so vulnerable?" Benito does not accept and does not resign that hi is alone. At the end of the story he says "You know, the whole city seems so corrupt these days. It's all real estate, and deals" here, Benito refers to the society who lives in that city which is San Francisco.
He is frecuently remembering his wife. In each word, in each movement, in each detail he sees, he is always remembering what Elizabeth said, did, thought. That is why he feels alone, because now she is not with him. Benito knows that he ended alone now that he is an old man and he is angry because of that. "But that is now how he ended up, the doctor tells himself, in a fierce interior whister. He ended up with Elizabeth, who was both, beautiful and good, a serious woman, with whom he lived harmoniously, if sometimes sadly (they had no children, and Elizabeth was given to depression)... The actual is now, of course, and he has ended up alone. Childless and without Elizabeth". Because of his loneliness, He is always rue for himself "The doctor takes deep breaths, inhaling the cool, fresh wind, and exhaling, he hopes and believes, the germs of self-pity that sometimes enter and threaten to invade his system".
In this lunch, he is intruduced to some friends of the owner "People extend their hands; they all say how nice it is to meet the doctor; several people say that they have heard so much about him". He is famous and alone. Also in this lunch or party, he meets some people from his past and he remembers how corrupt they are. He does not like to meet with these people, he feels uncomfortable and he is affraid of them "He feels the presence of those people in that rather vulgar, glassedin house behind him — of Dolores Gutierrez and Herman Toliver, and God knows who else, what other ghosts from his past whom he simply failed to see. As though they were giants, he feels their looming presences, anf feels their connection to some past year or years of his own life". Benito does not want nobody to remind him his past life. We do not know excactly why. Perhaps because it is a corrupt past of his life, o because it is full of Elizabeth's remembrances, or because he wants to bury his past as he buried Elizabeth.
Benito is affraid of this loneliness and he tries hopelessly to take out this loneliness from him. But he is aware that he must choose the right person. Not a person as the rest of the society, nor a corrupt person, no. He needs a right person. He knows Carla and he finds she is full os values. When he knows Carla, he becames too much built up hopes. In the party we can see that when Dolores arrives to try to separate Carla fom Benito, and she flatters Carla, she said: "Why don't you ever say such flattering things to me?" and benito asks himself "Is she flirting with him, serious flirting? Well, she could be". Since this point of the story we can see that the doctor discovers that he wants to marry this woman. He begins to feel good in her partnership: "This walk, and the conversation, are serving both to calm and to excite the doctor. Simultaneously. Most peculiar. He feels calm, and at the same time a strange warm, quite excitement". Anyone could imagine that Benito fell in love with Carla, but that is not true because in the story we do not find that and because we know Benito only wants to take away his loneliness. Benito only thinks of Carla's partnership, he imagines "She could redecorate the house any way she would like to, he thinks. Throw things out, repaint, reupholster, add mirrors. His imagination sees, all completed, a brilliant house, with Carla its brillian, shining, center". He thinks of carla as a person to share with him a life, but not a love as he thinks of Elizabeth "...the golden peaks of their time together. Beautiful days, long nights of love".
Benito thinks his life is fixed now that he is going to marry Carla, but his life and his hopes are destroyed by the news that Carla has a fiancé. "The sun has sunk into the ocean, and Benito's heart has sunk eith it, drowned. He shudders, despising himself. How could be possibly have imagined, how not have guessed?"
Now, the only one way that exists to end this loneliness is to go to Mexico with his mother and to the clinics he had founded "Well, I 'll be awfully glad to get back to Mexico... The doctor had no plan to say (much less to do) any of this before he spoke, but he knows that he is now committed to this action...He will buy a house in San Cristóbal de las Casas, and will bring his mother there, from Oaxaca, to live in that house for as long as she lasts. And he, for as long as he lasts, will work in his clinics, with his own poor... That as soon as he can arrange things he will be back in Chiapas, in Mexico. For the rest of his life". That is the only thing he can do for not feeling alone.
Finally, we can say that this short story is an example of what some people live. Not only in San Francisco or in Chiapas, but around the world. People feel alone. They feel abandoned even though there are many people around them, although they have family, and job, and a "normal" life, people feel alone. The case of Benito shows how a person can be rich, famous, and successful, but also can be alone even though he knows everybody. And also this case shows the rejection he has towards this society and his hopelessly desire to escape from this society and from this loneliness.

Edgar Allan Poe, The Murders In The Rue Morgue And The Detective Story

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most important writers in North American history. His poems and short stories are the most famous in the literature of that country. But it is not enough. Edgar Allan Poe is known as the creator of a literary gerne: the detective story.